Weeks after the essay, Trujillo empties the border of Haitians

Valcin's essay telling servants they belonged back on the land appeared weeks before Rafael Trujillo cleared Haitians out of the Dominican Republic. His campaign of anti-Haitianism laid the country's financial crisis on the people working the western estates, who were poor, foreign in law, and in no position to answer. Across roughly two weeks in October 1937 he ordered deportations and executions, and Grace Sanders Johnson puts the estimate at 20,000 dead. Among them were women whose migration Valcin had described as a failure of judgement. They had not stayed on the plot with the promising vegetables. They had gone east, because east was where the wage was, and the border they crossed to earn it was where they were killed. The essay and the massacre sit a few weeks apart in the same year, in the run of the same paper.

The Stage Society mounted two performances at the seven hundred and thirty seat Westminster Theatre, a Sunday evening show followed by a matinee. Hogsbjerg identifies what made them a first. Black professional actors from across the diaspora, led by Paul Robeson and including Robert Adams as Dessalines and Orlando Martins as Boukman, appeared on the British stage in a play written by a black playwright. Admission required at least a guinea, the annual subscription to a society founded in 1899 to evade the Lord Chamberlain's censorship through private performances. To fit two shows James had cut three scenes from the eleven-scene script, which removed Toussaint's wife and sons entirely. At the second performance James stepped in himself for the absent actor playing Macoya and took the applause as author from the stage.

A man in the Kenscoff mountains who was already legally married could not easily register as his own the children he had by a plase wife. If he was well known in his own commune he might travel to another one to do it. Where he did nothing, the mother's father would commonly declare the child as his own by an invented woman. If the grandfather was dead, or the mother was over thirty and had been settled with a man for some years, she could register the birth herself, and the child was entered as born of an unknown father. In the bourg of Kenscoff between 1934 and 1956 there were forty eight such registrations, made by forty mothers. Twenty three of them concerned a woman who had been living with the child's father for between five and twenty four years. Ten of the children had no siblings. Three were made legitimate later when their parents married.

The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale opened libraries at Port-au-Prince and Port-de-Paix and ran night courses through its chapters, including those at Miragoane and Jacmel. The subjects were history, home economics and Haitian culture, with grammar, foreign languages and writing on the list as well. Classes averaged fifty students. For an organisation founded a year after the American occupation ended, with no ministry behind it and no money from the state, four towns and a standing timetable is a serious institutional footprint. The centre of the curriculum is the part worth reading twice. Whatever else was offered, the core courses were childcare and household management. The league was teaching women to run homes better while arguing in its newspaper that women were socially enslaved. Both things were true at once, and the distance between them is the ordinary condition of a reform movement working with the students, the teachers and the expectations it can actually get.